Listen to New Google AI Program Talk Like a Human and Write Music

Google-owned artificial intelligence company DeepMind presented a deep neural network that generates amazingly human-like speech. Called WaveNet, this AI makes a significant advancement over existing speech synthesizers. What’s more, it can write pretty good classical music. DeepMind is a British company, previously known for creating machine-learning AI software that beat the world champion of the notoriously-intricate game Go. Machine learning allows computer systems to teach themselves and make predictions based on gathered data. The company claims that its WaveNet creates speech that can mimic any human voice and closes the gap with human speech performance by more than 50%. Google’s 500-person blind test study found people rating WaveNet’s English speech at a 4.21 (5 being realistic human speech), while concatenate speech got a 3.86 and parametric an even worse 3.67. WaveNet…